Feminism

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Feminism's Queer Theory

Annamarie Jagose
Feminism & Psychology 2009 19: 157
DOI: 10.1177/0959353509102152
The online version of this article can be found at:
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UNDISCIPLINED
Annamarie JAGOSE

Feminisms Queer Theory

This article argues that, in contradistinction to its widely promoted ethical openness to its
future, queer theory has been less scrupulous about its messy, flexible and multiple
relations to its pasts, the critical and activist traditions from which it emerged and that
continue to develop alongside in mutually informing ways. In particular, it assesses queer
theorys tangled, productive and ongoing relations with feminist theory. Returning to the
controversial analytic separation of gender and sexuality that has been prominently theorized as key to distinguishing between feminist and queer theoretical projects, the article
traces the influence of Gayle Rubins Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the
Politics of Sexuality through feminist and queer scholarship in order to demonstrate that,
however different their projects, feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in
both desiring and articulating the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.
Key Words: anti-identitarian, Judith Butler, essentialism, lesbian/gay studies, Gayle
Rubin, womens studies
What is queer theory? (Judith Butler, 1994b: 32)
What was queer theory? (Jonathan Goldberg, 2007)

In 1990 when Teresa de Lauretis organized a conference under the newly coined
rubric of queer theory, she promoted the term for its capacity to trouble what
she diagnosed as the built-in complacencies of lesbian and gay studies. For de
Lauretis, queer theory offered a way of thinking about lesbian and gay sexualities
beyond the narrow rubrics of either deviance or preference, as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses with other
constructions of the subject in culture (1991: iii). Since the increasing institutionalization of lesbian and gay studies risked sedimenting certain conceptual
paradigms and methodological practices by privileging some kinds of talk while
prohibiting others, de Lauretis intended queer theory as a corrective to what she
saw as the universalizing protocols of lesbian and gay studies that neglected to
Feminism & Psychology 2009 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and
Washington DC) http://fap.sagepub.com, Vol. 19(2): 157174; 0959-3535
DOI: 10.1177/0959353509102152

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position homosexuality in relation to gender and race, with their attendant

differences of class or ethnic culture, generational, geographical, and sociopolitical location (1991: iiiiv). Writing in the same journal three years later,
however, de Lauretis had already given up on queer theory as a critical term capable of addressing the intersectionalities of race, gender and sexuality. Despite her
earlier ambitions for its disruptive potential, she now considered it had quickly
become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry (1994: 297).
As this thumbnail sketch indicates, the life-cycles of what we have come to know
as queer theory have been weirdly accelerated and disordered, the term first surfacing as a provocation rather than a position, necessitating a number of attempts
to account retrospectively for its intellectual history (Hall, 2003; Jagose, 1996;
Morland and Willox, 2005; Sullivan, 2003; Turner, 2000).
Tracing the critical trajectory of queer theory, it becomes apparent that
attempts to describe and define it already a paradoxical ambition for a concept
that prominently insists on the radical unknowability of its future formations
occur simultaneously alongside harsher assessments of its limitations or expiry.
For every theorist who claims (or hopes) that queer theory describes a horizon
of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle
be delimited in advance (Halperin, 1995: 62), there is another who argues that
queer theory has not delivered on its potential, that queer theoretical practice
tends to reproduce the exclusionary normalizing effects it is nominally intended
to counter (Johnson, 2005; Prosser, 1998). Yet while there is no shortage of
people claiming that queer theory is finished, washed-up and over (for a particularly complacent account, see Bawer 1996), it is less commonly noted that a sense
of queer theorys finitude has animated from the start attempts to specify quite
what queer theory is or does. These anxious notings of the waning of queer
theoretical vitality at the moment of its inauguration might usefully be seen as an
instantiation of what has recently been theorized as queer temporality, a mode of
inhabiting time that is attentive to the recursive eddies and back-to-the-future
loops that often pass undetected or uncherished beneath the official narrations of
the linear sequence that is taken to structure normative life (Freeman, 2007).
Regularly announced by its critics, queer theorys death has been even more frequently anticipated in work that identifies with queer theory as a rubric and
attempts, often passionately, to convey some sense of its emergent critical coordinates. In her foreword to Tendencies, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
takes the 1992 New York City Gay Pride parade with its numerous performances of
cross-gender identification as a spectacular instantiation of the moment of Queer
(Sedgwick, 1993: xii). Recalling the sheer number of women and men in t-shirts
proclaiming Faggot and Dyke respectively, Sedgwick reads the parade as
crystallizing a certain transitive energy also in hyper-evidence in other activist and
pedagogic contexts. It is the prospect of a mass counter-public mobilized around
the cross-relational promise of queer, however, that gives Sedgwick pause. In the
short shelf-life American marketplace of images, she muses, maybe the queer
moment, if its here today, will for that very reason be gone tomorrow (1993: xii).

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Even though she intends her work as a counterclaim against that obsolescence
(1993: xii), Sedgwicks is not an idiosyncratic assessment. When Judith Halberstam
suggests Queer may soon lose all affectivity as a word, a marker, or a threat,
before parenthetically adding (it may already have done so) (1997: 256) she joins
with other prominent defenders and explicators of queer theory who similarly note
that, almost before it is clear what it describes exactly, the widespread take-up of
queer might mean that queer theorys time is up.
Although he also suspects that the queer moment might have passed, David
Halperin leavens his speculation about its use-by date by insisting on the importance of queers responsive flexibility, its non-territorial relation to the traditional,
identity-based grounds of political projects:
Queer politics may, by now, have outlived its political usefulness, but if its
efficacy and its productive political life can indeed still be renewed and
extended, the first step in this procedure will be to try and preserve the function
of queer identity as an empty placeholder for an identity that is still in progress
and has as yet to be fully realized, to conceptualize queer identity as an identity
in the state of becoming rather than as the referent for an actually existing form
of life. (1995: 11213)

Here, as elsewhere, there is a curious dialectic between the open-endedness of

queer, its resistance to any definitional specificity, and the spectre of its own
diminishing critical and political value. Perhaps even more than other critical
keywords, queer theory has had from the start an explicit stake in its own indefinability, its refusal to specify its project intrinsically connected to the sense that
its political efficacy depends on its ability to remain open to its own potentiality,
to its unknowable manifold futures; as Philip Brian Harper argues, it is precisely
the indeterminate character of queer critique that predicates its analytic force
(Harper, 2000: 645). Much of the critical optimism generated in its wake like
much of the critical pessimism derives from such claims about queer theorys
strategically open-ended relational character.
Yet if the one thing that everyone can agree on is that queer theory is not any
one thing, there is a case to be made that, in contradistinction to its widely promoted ethical openness to its future, queer theory has been less scrupulous about
its messy, flexible and multiple relations to its pasts, the critical and activist
traditions from which it emerged and that continue to develop alongside posing
new questions, reorienting themselves in relation to new objects, grafting themselves to new methodologies in mutually informing ways. To ask then, as
Jonathan Goldberg has recently, What was queer theory? is not to join the ranks
of those skeptics who, almost since its rise to academic prominence in the early
1990s, have been eager to announce queer theorys extinction but rather to
acknowledge that grasping the future possibility in the present might mean that
our sense of the past needs to be rethought (Goldberg, 2007: 502). As part of the
rethinking that Goldberg enjoins, the rest of this article assesses queer theorys
tangled, productive and ongoing relations with feminist theory. Rather than par-

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ticipate in the temporal disciplining of feminist from queer thought that stages
them as the before and after of some narrative of critical advancement, thinking
feminist and queer theory together can productively occasion a turn away from
linear historical time with its implicit prioritization of the present and its reliance
on heteronormative tropes of lineage, succession and generation.
The refusal of normative identity categories, so often taken as queer theorys signature gesture, is not unique to that project. Before there was queer theory that
is, before queer theory became the most recognizable name for anti-identitarian,
anti-normative critique feminist scholarship had already initiated a radically
anti-foundationalist interrogation of the category of women. Initially, in its 1980s
iterations, this feminist work was organized as a critique of essentialism, of the
notion that there was an isolable specificity to the business of being a woman (for
example, Fuss: 1989; Spelman, 1988). These considerations as to what properly
constituted the subject of feminism flourished into debates about affiliative or
coalitional politics; the fractal relations between different categories of social
identity and the doubled force of political representation, at once an instrument
of resistance and governmentality. The critique of women, therefore, was not
only motivated by the important acknowledgment that the inauguration of that
category as feminisms primary analytic overvalued gender at the expense of
other critically significant axes of identity, such as race, sexual orientation and
class, but also informed by an understanding of the contingency and regulatory
function of normative taxonomies of social recognition. Although in being frequently characterized as a 1980s concern these debates are often relegated to the
historical past, contemporary feminist theory continues to negotiate the grounds
of its own representational project, with one scholar suggesting that the essential
problem and ide fixe of feminist theory remains, to date, the problem of epistemic identification locating or dislocating the subject, fixing or deconstructing
the category women, discerning or dismantling the meaning of the feminist
we, and theorizing or displacing identities (Dietz, 2003: 414). The critical
tendency to corral feminisms sustained inquiries into the grounds of its own
political and intellectual projects to the past by representing them in terms of the
1980s essentialism debates often works as a strategy to typecast feminist theory
itself as old-fashioned and pass, temporally quarantined from new-school queer
theory, which with its refusal of identity deftly sidesteps this epistemological
morass. Careful consideration of the anti-foundationalist impulse in feminist
theory, however, suggests the partiality of this succession narrative and promotes
an alternate relation in which feminism is both an historical source of inspiration
for queer thought and its present-tense interlocutor.
In Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of Women in History,
Denise Riley surveys the historical formation of women in order to demonstrate
that the category does not name a founding sexed condition so much as a series
of negotiations with other historically specific designations such as men, society and body (1988: 98). What it means at any moment to be a woman then is

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embedded in a vast web of description covering public policies, rhetorics, feminisms, forms of sexualization or contempt, itself strung across larger and slower
subsidings of gendered categories, which in part will include the sedimented
forms of previous characterizations, which once would have undergone their own
rapid fluctuations (1988: 6). Given that the defining characteristics and attributes
of women have been variously specified since at least the 1790s in order to secure
the grounds of different political interests, Riley counter-intuitively insists that
women cannot self-evidently be the subject of contemporary feminism.
Feminism for Riley is therefore less an advocacy movement for women, understood as such on the basis of their natural properties or dispositions, than a project whose suspicion of its founding category is a crucial part of its critical
undertaking. If women is not the proper ground for feminism, nevertheless it is
fitting that feminism be the place where that category is strategically refused,
negotiated and redefined since, in terms of Rileys argument, it follows that
women is indeed an unstable category, that this instability has a historical
foundation and that feminism is the site of the systematic fighting-out of that
instability which need not worry us (1988: 5). The apparent nonchalance of
Rileys final phrase is intended to counter the considerable feminist anxiety about
the political effectiveness of querying the coherence of its foundational category.
For Riley, feminism is neither constrained nor delegitimated by acknowledging
the historical instability of the category of women. An active skepticism about
the integrity of the sacred category women, writes Riley, would be no merely
philosophical doubt to be stifled in the name of an effective political action in the
world. On the contrary, it would be a condition for action (1988: 113). Far from
allowing that there is, on the one hand, a practical, grounded and effective feminist politics that addresses itself to real-world concerns and, on the other, an
ideas-driven feminist theory committed to a genealogy of poststructuralist
thinking, Riley argues that an acknowledgment of the indeterminacy and impossibility of women is in feminisms interests, insisting that feminisms capacity
to remain politically useful depends on its ability to interrogate its foundational
category and the collective identity that category naturalizes.
The notion that there is no self-evident relation between feminism and women
was and remains contentious. Certainly, many feminists have expressed reservations about the efficacy for feminism of arguments about the partiality, fictiveness or incoherence of the category women. If gender is simply a social
construct, the need and even the possibility of a feminist politics becomes immediately problematic, writes Linda Alcoff. What can we demand in the name of
women if women do not exist and demands in their name simply reinforce the
myth that they do? (1988: 420). Tania Modleski (1991) similarly worries that
pointing up the instability of feminisms grounding category spells the end of
feminisms effectiveness as a social force: The once exhilarating proposition that
there is no essential female nature has been elaborated to the point where it is
now used to scare women away from making any generalizations about or
political claims on behalf of a group called women (1991: 15). She further

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suggests that the willingness to suspend or question the category women is only
available or attractive to those women advantaged by their class and race affiliations (1991: 22) and is itself a ruse of privilege, something about which Susan
Bordo also speculates when she asks could feminist gender-skepticism . . . now
be operating in the service of the reproduction of white, male knowledge/power?
(1990: 151).
These debates around the subject of feminism galvanized some feminists to
argue in different ways for a strategic occupancy of women, however, often
through an ontological reconceptualization of the category itself. Iris Marion
Young (1994), for instance, takes her distance from feminisms customary founding category when she argues that gender is not a self-evident basis for identity
formation, either individual or collective, suggesting instead that women might
be usefully thought as a series. Youngs reframing of women draws on Jean
Paul Sartres distinction between a group, which is a self-identifying collective
bound to a shared project by relations of mutual recognition, and a series, which
is an impersonal constellation of persons brought together temporarily by the
routinized happenstance of the material world and the social practices through
which that world is articulated. Young argues that women are not serialized as
women on the basis of shared qualities, experience or values. For Young, woman
is a serial collective defined neither by any common identity nor by a common
set of attributes that all the individuals in the series share, but, rather, it names a
set of structural constraints and relations to practico-inert objects that condition
action and its meaning (1994: 737). This strategy enables Young not only to
acknowledge the limitations of presuming any essential nature common to
women, but also to maintain a workable notion of women as a collective defined
as such by systemic practices of oppression without which she fears feminisms
radical political project must falter.
Intervening in what she sees as the deadlock between the essentialist understanding of women brokered by cultural feminism and the nominalist account of
women favored by poststructuralism, Alcoff similarly advocates a positional
definition in which what women can mean is a consequence of the interrelationship between historically available but shifting contexts a situation that
includes a network of elements involving others, the objective economic conditions, cultural and political institutions and ideologies, and so on (1988: 433)
and womens interpretation and negotiation of those contexts. Thinking about
women as a historically emergent position that constrains and enables certain
behaviors or knowledges allows Alcoff to maintain gender as a position from
which to act politically (1988: 433) but equally it commits her to a thoroughly
anti-foundational sense of what gender, and hence women, might potentially be
in some future time: Our concept of women as a category, then, needs to remain
open to future radical alteration, else we will preempt the possible forms eventual
stages of the feminist transformation can take (1988: 435). Alcoffs keenness to
stick with women as the necessary ground for political engagement does not
preclude the possibility that what women might come to signify will be unimag-

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inable from the position she currently occupies. Although in many ways Alcoffs
argument is consistent with what became known as strategic essentialism, which
advocated the maintenance of women on the grounds of political efficacy rather
than descriptive accuracy, her suggestion that the category of women should be
preserved in order to better enable its future unknowable forms is retrospectively
recognizable as analogous to claims frequently made for queer with its resistance to definition and its availability as a site of unimaginable becomings.
Judith Butler is prominently associated with this non-proprietorial rendering of
queer. If the term queer is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of
departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, she writes, it
will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always
and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of
urgent and expanding political purposes (1993: 19). Her anti-essentialist understanding of queer is informed by her earlier influential deliberations on performativity, a term she uses to bring to attention the way in which normative
reiterations bring into being the identity categories they seem only to express.
Taking feminist critiques of the category of women as her starting point, Butler
develops Michel Foucaults understanding of the productivity of power in order
to argue that, since power brings into being the subjects it only claims to govern
and regulate, the category women is not the grounds of feminisms project of
political representation but its discursive effect:
The identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist
politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation. Perhaps, paradoxically,
representation will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the
subject of women is nowhere presumed. (1990: 6)

For Butler, therefore, the task is less to extend feminisms representational reach
beyond the white, middle-class, heterosexual women that historically have overdetermined feminisms normative claims to equality than to understand that any
presumption, however strategic, of a prior identity in whose name feminism intervenes necessarily generates processes of exclusion and misrepresentation that are
contrary to feminist aims and values.
Butler brings this argument to bear most trenchantly on received understandings of the relation between sex and gender. Where in traditional feminist models
gender is understood as the cultural interpretation of the biological ground of sex,
Butler argues instead that the apparently self-evident and pre-cultural nature of
sex is better apprehended as itself genders effect: gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production
whereby the sexes themselves are established (1990: 7). This counter-intuitive
reordering of the temporal logics of the sex/gender system clears a space for
Butler to theorize gender not as the source of womens commonality, nor even
their oppression, but as an apparatus of power that feminism is itself implicated

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in to the extent that it fails to remark on its covert regulatory operation.

Furthermore, to the extent that Butlers provisional advocacy of queer as a term
whose political effectiveness depends on its sensitivity and responsiveness to the
regulatory effects of nomination develops directly out of her prior interest in
the performative temporalities of women, her work in many ways exemplifies
the permeable and coeval character of feminist and queer inquiry.
Thinking of feminist theory and queer theory as braided together in ongoing
relations requires a return to the controversial analytic separation of gender and
sexuality that has been prominently theorized as key to distinguishing between
feminist and queer theoretical projects. One way of clarifying what is conceptually at stake here is to trace through feminist and queer scholarship the critical
afterlife of Gayle Rubins influential essay Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical
Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. First published in 1984, Rubins essay
famously closes with a challenge to the assumption that feminism is or should
be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality (1993: 32). In making this claim,
Rubin revises her own earlier and equally influential argument that gender and
sexuality are modalities of the same underlying social process, both expressions
of a structuralist kinship system that over-determines the channels of political and
social power (1993: 32). In Thinking Sex, however, Rubin traces processes of
erotic stratification that cannot be reduced to or primarily explained in terms of
kinship as a social structure but might be discerned in what she elsewhere
describes as the outlines of another system that had different dynamics, a different topography, and different lines of force (1994: 85). In order to get at the
structuring logics of this other system, Rubin argues that it is necessary to develop a model of social power capable of articulating the full extent of the regulation of sexual expression. Sex is a vector of oppression, writes Rubin. The
system of sexual oppression cuts across other modes of social inequality, sorting
out individuals and groups according to its own intrinsic dynamics. It is not
reducible to, or understandable in terms of, class, race, ethnicity, or gender
(1993: 22). Since many of the erotic preferences that are central to Rubins discussion of sexual injustice sadomasochism, cross-generational sex, fetishism
and so on are not primarily defined in term of gender, she argues that feminism
ought not be the default discourse for thinking about the political dimensions of
erotic life (1993: 11, 35).
Although Rubin mostly couches her argument in terms of a universal feminism, it is worth remembering that the historical context for her intervention is
strongly shaped by what are often described as the feminist sex wars in which
feminism stood for oppositional rather than coherent perspectives. As a radical,
pro-sex feminist who promotes sexual liberalization for its capacity to secure
erotic agency and autonomy for a democratized range of sexual subjects, Rubin
critiques both the conservative feminist advocacy of sexual legislation as a way
of protecting womens erotic interests and the liberal moderate feminist position
that imagines a compromise solution might be found in the middle ground

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between these two. As Rubin later reflects, her essay assumed a largely feminist
readership. It was delivered at a feminist conference, aimed at a feminist audience, and written within the context of feminist discussion (1994: 91). For all its
insistence that sexuality cannot be fully apprehended through the rubric of
gender, Rubins is a resolutely feminist intervention. Acknowledging the keen
investments different schools of feminism have had in thinking sex, Rubin argues
that the progressive theorization of sex her essay calls for must include feminist
analyses of the workings of gender. The feminist movement, she writes, will
always be a source of interesting thought about sex (1993: 32). Nonetheless, the
primary intervention of Thinking Sex is to insist on making visible those
contexts in which gender-based analyses cannot account for the maintenance and
reproduction of sexual inequity and oppression.
Rubins essay has been widely acknowledged as key to the emergence of
lesbian/gay and, more recently, queer studies. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks
Epistemology of the Closet (1990), often cited as one of the inaugural works of
lesbian and gay studies, draws on Rubins work to suggest that, since sexuality
and gender are not reducible to each other, neither are lesbian and gay studies and
feminist studies. This book will hypothesize, with Rubin, writes Sedgwick in
her agenda-setting introduction, that the question of gender and the question of
sexuality, inextricable from one another though they are in that each can be
expressed only in terms of the other, are nonetheless not the same question
(1990: 30). Here Sedgwick distinguishes between gender and sexuality while
insisting on the impossibility and undesirability of disentangling them entirely;
they are separate no more than minimally, but nonetheless usefully (1990: 30).
Where Butlers emphasis on the regulatory production of naturalized gender is
bent on drawing attention to the cultural boost this gives heterosexuality the
unity of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender
identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality (1990: 31) Sedgwick
argues that because gender is customarily thought as a binarized relation between
terms whose so-called opposition ensures the allure of the diacritical frontier
between different genders (1990: 31), heterosexuality might inevitably be privileged by critical models whose first allegiance is to gender.
One of the consequences no less significant for being unintended of this
suggestion that gender or a critical attention to it might be necessarily indentured
to heteronormative conceptual models is the association of gender with fixed,
ideologically conservative positions against which sexuality can seem strategically flexible and mobile. Biddy Martin (1996) strenuously refuses this implication, influentially arguing that queer theorys advocacy of performativity,
anti-normativity and cross-gendered identification too often takes feminism as its
straight guy, representing it as committed to stable and restrictive understandings
of gender and particularly femininity that must be overcome in the name of
political resistance or transgression. Accordingly she resists the neat logic whereby anti-foundationalist celebrations of queerness rely on their own projections of
fixity, constraint, or subjection onto a fixed ground, often onto feminism or the

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female body, in relation to which queer sexualities become figural, performative,

playful, and fun (1996: 712). In two related essays, Martin argues for the conceptual benefits of Rubins analytic separation of gender from sexuality and the
queer antinormativity to which it gives rise while also insisting on the weakness
of any account that does not adequately acknowledge both feminisms own complex histories of engagement with gender, which as we have seen include
the interrogation and even the refusal of women as feminisms foundational
category, and the intricacies of gendered identifications, many of which get articulated through identities and practices more readily thought sexual.
Notwithstanding Martins incisive critique, Sedgwicks careful account, like
that of Rubins on which it draws, is neither unfeminist nor anti-feminist. Not only
does she insist that, however distinct, the analytic axes of gender and sexuality
cannot be wholly prized apart but she also emphasizes that, far from superseding
feminisms gender-based analysis, a nascent gay studies stands to learn at least two
lessons from feminist studies more developed knowledge paradigms: namely, that
relations of social domination and subordination are complex and require correspondingly fine-grained intersectional analyses, and that the hierarchical logics of
categories of social stratification commonly exceed their own explicit specification
to order and structure other, seemingly unrelated, taxonomic systems. As part of
her commitment to ensuring that she not be read as making an argument for any
epistemological or ontological privileging of an axis of sexuality over an axis of
gender (Sedgwick, 1990: 34), Sedgwick concludes this discussion by pointing out
the necessary limitations of a lesbian and gay approach to the larger project of
conceiving a theory of sexuality as a whole, again drawing on Rubins essay to
emphasize the many ways in which gender of object-choice fails to capture how
sexuality is organized and experienced.
Sedgwicks caution that lesbian and gay studies could no more persuasively
author a comprehensive theory of sexuality than could feminism might seem initially to have been disregarded by the editors of the substantial and authoritative
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), which canonizes Rubins Thinking
Sex as its first entry. In their brief introduction, Henry Abelove, Michle Aina
Barale and David M. Halperin sketch out the methodological grounds of an
emergent lesbian and gay studies through analogous reference to the longer established project of womens studies: Lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality approximately what womens studies does for gender (1993: xv). This pithy
claim has been subject to a lengthy critique by Butler, who, in Against Proper
Objects (1994a), finds fault with the analogy between womens studies and
lesbian/gay studies on several grounds. First, she argues that it authorizes the
project of lesbian and gay studies via a reductive account of that of womens
studies, such that the kind of sex that one is and the kind of sex that one does
belong to two separate kinds of analysis: feminist and lesbian/gay, respectively
(1994: 4). In so far as she reads the analogy as positing gender as the proper
scholarly object of womens studies while annexing sexuality for lesbian/gay
studies, Butler argues that it necessarily marginalizes and obscures feminisms

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tradition of radical sexual theorizing. Second, Butler argues that, in taking gender and sexuality as the governing rubrics that distinguish between womens and
lesbian/gay studies, the analogy is unable to accommodate other axes of social
differentiation such as race and class (1993: 6) that have significantly
structured the political projects of both. Third, Butler argues that the separation
of gender from sexuality as the grounds of two different fields of critical inquiry
is inattentive to the degree to which the normative reproduction of gender
supports and enables the regulation of sexuality.
In light of Butlers critique, however, it is important to note that in the context
of their introduction, Abelove et al. offer their analogy between lesbian/gay and
womens studies not to adjudicate decisively between the two fields but rather to
draw a comparison between them on the grounds of their corresponding antifoundationalist tendencies. After all, the analogous turn to womens studies
occurs as part of a larger argument intended to demonstrate that lesbian/gay
studies is not simply about or relevant to lesbians and gay men: Lesbian/gay
studies, in short, cannot be defined exclusively by its subject, its practitioners, its
methods, or its themes. An analogy with womens studies may help to clarify this
point (1993: xv). Just as womens studies the example given is specifically
womens history seeks less to inaugurate women as a new object of study than
to transform existing knowledge formations by establishing the centrality of
gender as a fundamental category of historical analysis and understanding
(1993: xv), so too lesbian/gay studies seeks to establish sexuality as an analytic
rubric of broad relevance and importance for a diverse range of disciplinary fields
and interests. What womens studies does for gender, therefore, is not to lay
authoritative and sole claim to it but to demonstrate the degree to which other
critical traditions including lesbian/gay studies presumably are diminished by
being inattentive to its workings. Moreover, Abelove et al. take some care to
qualify their claim by noting that they do not advocate that sexuality and gender
must be strictly partitioned (1993: xv) and that the question of the proper degree
of their separation is currently a matter of lively debate and ongoing negotiation
(1993: xvi). When Abelove et al. orient their ambitions for lesbian/gay studies in
analogous relation to womens studies, they do not, therefore, proprietarily claim
sexuality for lesbian/gay studies, still less install gender as womens studies only
scholarly license. Rather, the key operational force of their analogy is to point up
the ways that lesbian/gay studies, like womens studies, might eschew an identitarian constituency in order to insist on the pertinence of what has previously
been imagined as its key term for the wider scholarly map.
Acknowledging the feminist credentials of the editors of The Lesbian and Gay
Studies Reader, Butler justifies her lengthy consideration of their formulation of
the relationship between womens and lesbian/gay studies on the grounds that it
is a productive exemplification of a more widespread critical tendency. Within
queer studies generally, she writes, a methodological distinction has been
offered which would distinguish theories of sexuality from theories of gender and,
further, allocate the theoretical investigation of sexuality to queer studies, and the

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analysis of gender to feminism (1994a: 1). In Butlers account, her sustained

critique of Abelove et al.s analogy is pursued in order to bring to critical visibility
a problematic that is housed, in its broadest iteration, not in lesbian/gay studies
proper but within queer studies more generally. This conflation in Butlers essay
of lesbian/gay and queer studies is significant for not being consistently held.
For if initially it seems that lesbian/gay studies can stand in for or instantiate a
broader queer studies phenomenon, Butlers more sustained argument is that
lesbian/gay studies, by dint of its narrow interest in same-sex erotics, cannot lay
even the same claim as queer studies potentially does to the wider field of sexuality. Twice, in service of this latter argument, Butler describes the inclusion of
Rubins essay in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader as an appropriation
(1994a: 8, 10). Noting Rubins focus on a rich array of sexually marginalized
practices and populations, Butler argues that the expansive and coalitional sense
of sexual minorities cannot be rendered interchangeable with lesbian and gay
and it remains an open question whether queer can achieve these same goals of
inclusiveness (1994a: 11).
In limiting lesbian/gay studies in this way in arguing that it would be fallacious (1994: 10) or improbable (1994: 11) to expect that lesbian and gay
studies could address sexuality in its broadest sense Butler reads against not just
the spirit but also the letter of Abelove et al.s anti-assimilationist argument. For
far from staking out a quasi-disciplinary territory defined by the sharp-edged
clarity of its scholarly objects, Abelove et al. insist from the start that lesbian/gay
studies is not limited to the study of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men (1993: xv).
Just as the mid-1980s feminist sex wars are the necessary context for understanding the stakes of Rubins analytic separation of gender and sexuality, so here
Abelove et al.s analogical account of womens and lesbian/gay studies needs to
be understood in relation to the early 1990s institutionalization of a lesbian and
gay studies in the process of being transformed by queer activism and theory.
Attracted to the rubric of queer studies but wanting to acknowledge the force
of current usage, Abelove et al. admit some ambivalence about the prominence
of lesbian and gay studies for their anthology and the field it attempts to represent (1993: xvii). The forms of study whose institutionalization we seek to
further have tended, so far at least, to go by the names of lesbian and gay,
they write. The field designated by them has become a site for inquiry into many
kinds of sexual non-conformity, including, for instance, bisexuality, transsexualism, and sadomasochism (1993: xvii). Far more than it is Abelove et al.s,
it is Butlers disciplining move to constrain lesbian/gay studies to the study of
lesbian and gay subjects and to characterize the field as inaugurated by the exclusive claim to sexuality as its proper object.
Although her reading of Abelove et al.s introduction as exemplary of a queer
critical tendency to define itself against the ostensibly gender-bound concerns of
feminism relies on the very strategy she cautions against, Butler finishes her essay
with the following admonition: Perhaps the time has arrived to encourage the
kinds of conversations that resist the urge to stake territorial claims through the

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reduction or caricature of the positions from which they are differentiated (1994a:
21). In figuring ideal relations between feminist, lesbian/gay and queer theories via
the register of conversation, Butler suggests that, rather than authorizing themselves by crudely demarcating their political projects from one and other, feminist,
lesbian/gay and queer studies might productively negotiate their differences in
real-time exchanges, trafficking with each other to produce better, more nuanced
accounts of powers operation. For Butler, such conversations take place not in
spite of but because of the differences of the interlocutors, their proximate yet
unshared projects enabled by the rifted grounds (1994a: 21) they inhabit.
For very similar reasons, Janet Halley (2006) has recently advocated an
entirely different, almost oppositional, strategy, which operates under the rubric
of queer while suspending that of feminism. Tracing a 20-year genealogy of progressive theoretical work on sexuality in the USA, Halley assesses the respective
models of power developed in feminist, lesbian/gay and queer traditions of
thought. Like Butler, Halley cherishes the differences between these theoretical
traditions, arguing that the splits between the theories are part of their value
(2006: 3). In order to retain and benefit from the disagreements and inconsistencies of these theories their irreducibility to each others operational vocabularies and conceptual frameworks; their contradictory accounts of the world forcing
some difficult questions about what counts as political agency or efficacy
Halley advocates a politics of theoretic incommensurability (2006: 3). Although
in her reading of Butlers Against Proper Objects (2006: 2528) Halley represents Butler as struggling to bring to heel renegade lesbian/gay and queer
analyses by domesticating them within feminist frameworks, in my reading,
Halleys advocacy of incommensurability resonates strongly with Butlers
elaboration of the rifted grounds of feminist, lesbian/gay and queer thought as
a series of constituting differentiations (1994a: 21), the full acknowledgment of
which prevents any one discourse congealing authoritatively. Where Butler
promotes the instability of the field formation constituted through feminist,
lesbian/gay and queer inquiry as the necessary conditions for dialogue, however,
Halley suggests to the contrary that the contradictions between different theorizations of sexuality call for a halt in conversation, an interruption she specifically and most prominently codes as Taking a Break from Feminism (2006: 34).
Like others before her but to different ends, Halleys argument crucially relies
on Rubins Thinking Sex. Installing Rubins essay as the inaugural theoretical
call to take a break from feminism, Halley argues that left-wing theorizing about
sexuality would benefit from taking such a break because of the prevailing
assumption that progressive thinking about sexuality must necessarily be feminist. Accordingly, she contextualizes her insistent call to take a break from
feminism by suggesting that no one theory, no one political engagement, is
nearly as valuable as the invitation to critique that is issued by the simultaneous
incommensurate presence of many theories (2006: 9). In Halleys argument, it is
not feminism itself but its alleged dominance in sexuality studies that motivates
her call to take a break from the terms whereby it has too long constrained the

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coordinates of sexual theorizing. But what is the feminism from which Halley
advocates taking a break? How is feminism to be defined so that it is possible to
know conclusively when one no longer operates within its ambit? Halley recognizes the high stakes of her definition of feminism and the ethical burden that
falls to her to understand feminism as capaciously as possible (2006: 17). It is
therefore something of a surprise to learn that, having charged herself with the
task of coming up with the most generously roomy account of feminism, Halley
offers instead a three-part definition whereby feminism must distinguish between
forms of masculinity and femininity; must define femininity in a subordinated
relation to masculinity and must seek an end to such subordination.
Pared back to such clean lines, this minimalist definition (2006: 17) is
frequently rendered by Halley via the quasi-algebraic formula: m/f, m > f and
carrying a brief for f (2006: 23). Anything that fails to conform to the rubric of
m/f, m > f and carrying a brief for f is, in Halleys account, disqualified from
feminism. A consequential outcome of such a definition is that it attributes to
feminism itself a problem that is more properly an effect of its own narrow bandwidth of recognition. The conceptual strain such tautological reasoning introduces into Halleys account is evident in her ruling that the failure of her
definition of feminism always to capture the hybrid feminisms socialist,
anti-racist, and postcolonial feminisms(2006: 20) but presumably also sexpositive, transgender and queer feminisms does not register the inadequacy of
her formulation but functions as evidence of their having already taken a break
both from feminism and hence the rightness of her own strategy. Responding to
an earlier essay-length version of Halleys argument, Robyn Wiegman (2004)
similarly refuses the self-licensing logic of Halleys promotion of a queer over a
feminist perspective. What happens if we wrestle feminism from such definitional singularity? asks Wiegman, proposing instead to take feminism . . . all the
way down to its non-self-replicating, epistemically disjunctive, anti-foundationalist theoretic core. After all, why should queer theory get all the theoretic thrill?
(2004: 94).
With this forceful reminder that feminism is neither self-identical nor sanitarily
quarantined from the messy undoings of normative sexuality Halley more readily
associates with queer theorizing, Wiegman returns us to the anti-foundationalist
drive in feminist theory that I earlier sourced to Rileys work. This is not a
feminist tradition that Halley engages, yet early in her book she connects her project of taking a break from feminism to Rileys Am I That Name? (1988). Keen
to emphasize that her call to take a break from feminism is not the same as a call
for the end of feminism, Halley points out that, in the interests of multiplying the
possible critical perspectives available for thinking sexuality, it might be
desirable to have intermittent relations to feminism, to suspend allegiance to its
governing terms in order to reframe its diagnosis of the political situation: Any
one person can flicker in and out of feminism the term is Denise Rileys; she
was writing about how one flickers in and out even of being a woman without
feminisms being destroyed or even rendered theoretically inaccessible (Halley,

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2006: 8). Although Halley only touches down lightly on Riley, recontextualizing
no more than a single borrowed word to license her own argument, this moment
is worth sticking with long enough to tease out what it almost intimates about the
complicated histories of feminist engagement with the terms of its own institutionalization that Halleys minimalist definition of feminism disavows.
In arguing for the possibility, the desirability even, of not being feminist at
every moment, Halley means to bracket feminisms customary terms m and f,
in Halleys narrow definition in order to open up the theorizing of sexuality to
other analytic frameworks that could see other arrangements of m and f and
other kinds of power or might even try to see sexuality in terms that dont refer
to male and female at all (2006: 8). Although the flickering relation to feminism
that Halley espouses merely contests feminisms universal relevance for thinking
about sex and power rather than writes it off altogether as a conceptual model,
Halleys narrowly prescriptive understanding of feminism is unable to recognize
as feminist a whole tradition of feminist work itself unprogrammatic and divergent that interrogates its relations to its normative groundings in gender. Since
Halley authorizes this step in her argument via a glancing reference to that feminist tradition, a return to Rileys Am I That Name? can usefully suggest the scale
of what is at stake in Halleys quarantining of feminist and queer inquiries and
political engagements. In paraphrasing Rileys argument as being about how one
flickers in and out even of being a woman, Halley implies both that the discontinuous relation to feminism she advocates is connected to the irregular occupancy of the category women noted by Riley and that the former is less
strenuous a process than the latter. Yet a closer reading of Rileys work indicates
that feminism is enabled rather than suspended by the epistemological incoherencies of the category of women.
Rileys claim that gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering
nature (1988: 96) comes in the final chapter of her book where she defends the
implications of her interrogation of women against those who might read it as
evidence of the limitations or demise of feminisms capacities for political intervention. In order to demonstrate to the contrary that feminism is enabled by a
recognition of the inconstancy of women, Riley returns to the key question of
the historical and political indeterminacy of the category of women what she
calls in her opening chapter the peculiar temporality of women (1988: 8) by
taking up as a fairly straightforward version of . . . this temporality (1988: 96)
the instance of an individuals intermittent awareness of her gendered condition.
Canvassing a range of scenarios from random street sexual harassments to the
experience of childbirth, Riley argues that:
even the apparently simplest, most innocent ways in which one becomes
temporarily a woman are not darting returns to a category in a natural and harmless state, but are something else: adoptions of, or precipitations into, a designation there in advance, a characterisation of woman. (1988: 97)

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If Halley references Riley in order to suggest, given the possibility of flickering in and out even of being a woman, how much more easily achieved is a
temporary or intermittent occupancy of feminism, she does so by overlooking the
fact that, for Riley, an acknowledgment of the temporal peculiarity of women
understood phenomenologically, historically and politically is the grounds for
a feminism that refuses to be bound to the normative characterization of its
founding category: That women is indeterminate and impossible is no cause
for lament. It is what makes feminism; which has hardly been an indiscriminate
embrace anyway of the fragilities and peculiarities of the category (1988:
11314). Contrary to Halleys implicit logic, Rileys project suggests rather that
feminism turns up its analytic wattage with the flickering of gender. When feminism is understood to exceed the gender-naturalizing formulation of m/f, m > f
and carrying a brief for f, it is far less self-evident that it needs to be suspended
in order to allow a queer theoretic to have its run.
Speaking of the opacity and self-referential nature of what she calls the big keyword[s] of contemporary cultural theory, Meaghan Morris notes that such
words now rarely refer to actions, events, processes, or problems that people can
solve, but are dense little bibliographic balls. They are condensed invocations of
an archive of debates (Morris, 2000: 17). Hardened off as theoretical keywords,
the critical stance that feminist and queer is each most commonly asked to
instantiate pits them against each other in a rigor mortis of opposition. The scholarly scrummage over Rubins Thinking Sex, however, affords one opportunity
for acknowledging the difficulty, even the impossibility, of distinguishing decisively between feminist and queer critical traditions. Similarly, situating the
queer investment in performativity in relation to a feminist genealogy of the
category of woman (Butler, 1990: 5) recognizes the partial overlaps and shared
ventures of queer and feminist projects. Feminist theory, no less than queer
theory, is a broad and heterogeneous project of social critique that works itself out
across provisional, contingent and non-unitary grounds, unconstrained by any
predefined field of inquiry and unanchored to the perspective of any specifiable
demographic population. The rapid emergence of queer as a critical and activist
term in the 1990s and concomitantly the accelerated ascendancy of queer theory
within the academy do not attest to the waning of feminist theorys relevance.
Rather, the possibilities for queer feminist thought in the 21st century speak to a
specific set of historic circumstances a bunch of different pressures and influences that cannot be neatly narrated in terms of cause/effect relations that have
enabled a significant anti-identitarian and anti-assimilationist turn in western
thinking about classes of social regulation and political recognition. However
different their projects the flashpoints of their inauguration; their historical relation to institutionalization; their critical failures and their potentialities feminist
theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating the
complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.

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Annamarie JAGOSE is Professor of Film, Television and Media Studies at the

University of Auckland. She is author of Lesbian Utopics (Routledge, 1994),
Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York University Press, 1996) and
Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence
(Cornell University Press, 2002). She is also the author of several prize-winning
novels, most recently Slow Water (Random House, 2003). Her current project,
Orgasmology, is an investigation of the cultural meanings that have accrued to
orgasm across the 20th century.
ADDRESS: Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, The University
of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142, Aotearoa New Zealand.
[email: a.jagose@auckland.ac.nz]

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